koxinga, that analogy is ridiculous. the inflections all carry different connotations in their respective contexts, but “yes” still means the affirmative every time. i’ve been studying mandarin for nearly a decade now, and if you subjected the closest chinese equivalent to yes (“shi,” i’d say) to that test, you’d wind up with “poem,” “ten,” “food,” and “yes/it is.” besides, variations in inflection exist alongside this tone system in chinese, too, but it’s operating on another level of the language.
crazy horse, that’s amazing. except i’m still confused - that quotation suggests that speakers of vietnamese will say words at the same pitch each time, but does it specifically say anywhere that the same syllable uttered at a different pitch will have a distinct meaning?
But the point is that the tones do exist in English, and they are used to convey information. You’re painting a picture of magical sing-song Orientals leveraging a unique attribute of their spoken language which is total BS.
Also, sorry, but this is my last response until you learn to capitalize.
I’m not a native or student speaker of either language so I am only going by what the study suggests and a few basic googles about tonal languages.
But what the studies imply really isn’t that hard to accept. If anyone is studying Chinese, no matter for how long, then it obviously isn’t your native language. The whole point of this theory is that it is the early development of a first language which associates the pitches of words to different meanings as laying a foundation - etching the pathways in the language center of the brain as it were - that makes it easier to memorize musical tones and associate them with the names of notes later.
A comparison of different ‘tones of voice’ one might say “yes” or other English words is irrelevant to this point. We don’t learn early language based on tone, frequency, at all. Interpreting tone and inflection as having a meaning other than the normal meaning of a word in English is an ability learned over time. We don’t know what sarcasm is yet to know a “yes” is said sarcastically, we pick that up over time. But an early Mandarin speaker does have to recognize the pitch in order to know the basic meaning of the word.
in the interest of avoiding an argument over bullshit typographical conventions, let me be as clear as possible in the hopes that you’ll refrain from patronizing me further:
If you’ll recall the question that I asked, I was skeptical about the Mandarin-music connection to start with, and nowhere have I described Mandarin as song-like or even musical, hence the reason why I asked this stupid question in the first place. I am painting no picture of Chinese as “magical” (where this one came from I don’t know) or “sing-song,” and no one has even used the word “Orientals.” Of course tonality exists to some degree in many languages, perhaps all of them, but the relationship of tone to meaning found in languages like Chinese - and that goes for every word, not the whole sentence - is very distinctive. If the same sensitivity to tone required of an English speaker were all that were required to speak Chinese, then English speakers wouldn’t have so much difficulty getting used to that system. Anyway, the question addresses the issue of tonality as it applies specifically to Mandarin, so who cares what other languages have tonal components?
If they do draw that explicit conclusion, that strikes me as incredibly poor research. Early childhood language development is so complex that it’s impossible to say for certain that anything has been “etched into the child’s brain.” :rolleyes:
Certainly there may be a correlation between people exhibiting perfect pitch, and the incidental fact that they are Mandarin speakers. But any good researcher would explicitly rule out the thousand other factors (education, as someone mentioned, non-linguistic cultural context, self-selection bias . . .) before settling on an explanation like this. Research is a lot more than saying, “hey y’all, lookit this, there must be a connectshun! A-hyuhk!” More like the opposite, in fact.
Perfect pitch is, generally, an uncanny ability to distinguish between discrete pitches. Someone with a well-developed sense of it will be able to distinguish two pitches only a few cycles apart.
A tonal system like that of Mandarin also relies on distinguishing pitches, though not with such specificity. It’s not hard to believe that a Chinese speaker, being compelled early on to develop their ability to distinguish pitches, would have something of a head start once they start studying music, as having that ability could make it easier to play and hear music. We’ve established that perfect pitch is something that needs to be developed and practiced - it doesn’t sound so far-fetched that a language like Mandarin might contribute to that.
I have a minor quibble with this. A person with good relative pitch can distinguish pitches a few cycles apart. I do not have perfect pitch, but play me two tones a few cents apart and I can tell which one is higher or lower with no difficulty. Absolute (aka “perfect”) pitch allows one to recall a specific pitch with no reference tone. It’s not really the act of distinguishing tones so much as naming or replicating them with no reference.
It’s a theory. But that generally is all we have to work with. Over time a theory is either continually supported or it is proven to be false. There is a demonstrated higher occurrence of perfect pitch among native speakers of tonal languages. How and why remain just theories. The cites provided and another below seem to be founded on good science, conducted with good scientific method, and they do take into account that they don’t take everything into account.
But they, combined with much more anecdotal and ‘common knowledge’ discussions of the phenomenon, do demonstrate that the theory shouldn’t be discounted off-hand as being bunk or just a poorly designed study.
ma, ma, ma and ma. 4 different tonals and 4 different meanings. Koxinga was simplifying to get the idea across.
ma, high tone mother
ma, upward tone hemp
ma downward tone horse
ma level tone scold
Happy now?
punch line loser, you started this thread by asking, “Are there suddently tones of Chinese kids being born with perfect pitch?”. Where do you get the idea that there has been a rise in the number of Chinese children with perfect pitch? Give us any kind of citation that this is true. If you don’t have a citation for that fact, there isn’t anything to discuss here.
FWIW, my kids, who are native Mandarin speakers, don’t have perfect pitch.
This could also easily be selection bias. To get accepted into a state sponsored advanced music program in China might require perfect pitch (or demonstrated ability) as a pre-requisite. I have no idea if this is the case, but knowing China it easily could be.
The studies included other tonal languages besides Mandarin and included test groups that had no musical training at all.
The theory isn’t that your kids would automatically have perfect pitch because they are native Mandarin speakers, it is that they have a higher probability of learning perfect pitch at any age whereas speakers of non-tonal languages show almost zero ability to learn it later in life after their early childhood language has been set in stone.
It’s not a guarantee of an automatic case of perfect pitch, just a higher probability of developing it as a learned ability rather than the formerly “God given” talent it was for many years believed to be.
English does not use tones to distinguish between different words. Mandarin does.
You will never find a pair of English words (as individuated by lexical definition) whose pronunciations differ only in tone. But you will find many such pairs in Mandarin.
Many of you appear to be disagreeing with this claim! If so, then please provide an example of a pair of English words whose pronunciations differ only in tone!
The word “really” said in that tone has exactly the same lexical content as the word “really” said with any other tone. (Well, of course “really” has a couple of different lexical uses, but that’s beside the point since you can’t distinguish between these uses purely through tone.)
This is not true of Mandarin. In Mandarin there are several words pronounced “ma” with different lexical content, where the difference in lexical content can be discerned purely through tone.
I don’t disagree, but I’m curious whether differences in emplasis in English would count as a difference in tone. There are words that are different depending on whether the first or second syllable carries the stress. Usually it’s the difference between a related noun and a verb. CON-flict vs. con-FLICT.
Then there’s the classic: ‘What’s that in the road ahead?’ vs. “What’s that in the road. A head?”
And, yes, even if stress differences count, there are far fewer instances where it matters much.
English is not a tonal language, but tone does convey information and can change lexical meaning. It’s not quite the same as a tonal language, but there are parallels.
Well, “really” can be a question, an emphatic yes, or even a emphsizing modifier. Another example would be “no shit”, whose meaning changes with the tone. Both examples clearly give a non Mandarin speaker working examples of the mandarin rising second tone and falling fourth tone.
Chinese tones are certainly important, but you’re also taking that in a vacume. Remember, written Chinese is virtually unambiguous (and definately so from context), just as “their” “they’re” and “there” are unambiguous in English.
For spoken Chinese, since time immemorial native Chinese speakers know that a single syllable, especially without context, can be ambiguous. Therefore, especially in spoken Chinese and to a lesser extent in written modern Chinese, words are di-syallabicized (eg, use two syllables instead of one to make the word unambiguous). Thus in Chinese, one says the equivalent of “go out” instead of “go” (出去）, “eat rice” instead of “eat” （吃饭) and on and on. As a result, the tones are not nearly as important as they would be if people only spoke in single syllables.
The phrase “Do you have the time,” in purely lexical terms, is a question asking whether or not I posess a thing called “the time”, whatever that might be.
But said in any realistic context, the utterance of the phrase is not meant to ask about whether anyone posesses anything, much less “the time.” This is true despite the phrase’s lexical meaning. The purpose of the utterance is not determined by its lexical meaning.
The word “dude” always has the same lexical meaning. (I’d define it, basically, as meaning “a young man.”)
But in different contexts, said in different ways, people use utterances of the word to perform tasks other than referring to a young man. This is the same phenomenon as described above concerning “do you have the time.”
In all languages–Mandarin and English and every other one that is spoken by humans–pitch changes can constitute the context that determines in what way the lexical content of an utterance is to be taken into consideration.
Only in some languages–Mandarin for example–do pitch changes actually determine what that lexical content is..
When you say “no shit,” every time, it means (lexically speaking) exactly the same thing. (I’d say the meaning is “That is worth saying.”)
But different contexts can cause that lexical meaning to take on different roles in understanding what is intended by the utterance. In some contexts–ones priming us to take utterances sarcastically–we know to take the intent of the utterance to be to communicate the opposite of its lexical meaning. But the lexical meaning remains the same!
I am not sure what your point is here. What do you take to be the import of the fact that written Chinese is virtually unambiguous?
I’m not sure what you mean by “important” here, but the fact is there are many, many minimal pairs in Chinese wherein the only distinction is one of tone. There are no such minimal pairs in English.